3. What Else?

3.1. How to test, whether it works

Ok ... you use one of the described powersaving possibilitys and you want to verify, whether it works. Here are two ways to check it:

If you have temperature controlled Fan on your CPU-Heatsink, you could check for the noise level of the Fan to see whether it works or not. After a few idle minutes you give the CPU somthing to do.

The same procedure as above works also with a monitoring program for the cpu-temperature (like lm-sensors or xmbmon).

3.2. Known Bugs/Problems

There are two known bugs in the Athlon/Duron processor. This is number 11 and number 14 in the AMD Athlon Processor Revision Guide. It looks like the Athlon XP is significantly less often affected by these bugs. So if you have an Athlon XP you are on the lucky side (like me).

There could be following problems (caused by the bugs):

• skips during sound playback

• skips and slowdown during video playback

• slowdown of the ultra-DMA harddisk transfers

• system hangs

• USB problems

• someone reported a high cheeping noise

Sometimes a BIOS-update will help (it exists as a workaround for bug 11, which could be done by the BIOS). But as far as I know there are only a few boards out there which have this workaround in the BIOS.

For the Asus A7V133-C, it is known that the BIOS-option PCI master read caching will solve most problems when it is enabled. So look at your BIOS to see whether it has such functionality.

It is also known that on some boards, the BIOS option Delayed Transaction solves some of the problems. You may want to give this option a try too.

WARNING: On boards with KT133A, this could enable the famous VIA-Southbridge bug!

From a Newsnet post, regarding Asus A7V:

• without delayed transaction: sound-skips and TV-skips

• with delayed transaction: no sound skips and only slight TV problems

• with delayed transcation and master read caching: nearly no TV problems and no sound skips at all

There are other causes for problems:

• the PSU is not strong enough to handle the fluctuations in the power consumption of the processor/motherboard

• some motherboard voltage-regulators could have the same problems like the PSU ;)

• you have a K7S5A (as far as I know, this board could be really wierd when power-saving is enabled)

If you have minor problems with power-saving enabled, and nevertheless want to use power-saving, you can enable the power-saving by default, and turn it off if you want to playback music, watch TV, ...

3.3. ToDo

Adding more chipsets and more informations to this document.

Maybe make a motherboard list with "working" and "not working" marks.

3.4. Translations

Translations into different languages also exist. At the moment, most of them are translations of the pre-XML version of this document.

Spanish by Carlos Mayo

French by Mathieu Pillard

Italian by Maurizio Fantino

German (only parts) by Fabian Mohren

Japanese by Seiji Kaneko